As the Cardinal Flies

[Aside to sanguinity: you clearly need to see this.]

Now, then.

The collection for crossworks is live, and for once I'm going to get the thank-you post up in ridiculously good time. There is a great deal of excellent work in this exchange - I may in fact do a recs post here in a bit - but in the meantime: someone's written me a genuinely delightful tale that takes full advantage of the "mix any two things I've mentioned" element of the exchange, and that would be this:

Lost (and Found)
Fandoms: Young Wizards - Duane; Valdemar - Lackey
Rating: all ages
Category: gen
Warnings: none
Words: ~2200
Characters: Dairine Callahan, original Valdemaran Companion
Additional Tags: crossover, interspecies friendship, portal fantasy, worldgates

"I'll have you know I'm not a horse girl."
"Then it's a good thing I'm not a horse."

Suffice to say that the author knows both these canons well, and that the blending is beautifully done. If you're familiar with both of them, it should be clear just from the summary that they've got the character voices down perfectly, and it keeps right on going from there.

[wakes up, glances at date]
[!!!!]

Ye ghods and little fishes, has it been almost two years since I last looked at this list?

(OTOH, I've clearly justified the "Procrastination" callout in the original header....)

I'm not even going to try and justify having let the darned thing sit that long, but at the same time, some of these Q-and-A combos were just too impressively bizarre not to share even at this late date.

Herewith the character list from the (semi-)current round. Note that I'm now running my lists through a randomizer prior to opening a new round:

1. Maria Hill • MCU
2. Shego • Kim Possible
3. Elminster of Shadowdale • Forgotten Realms
4. Emily Pollifax • Mrs. Pollifax (Gilman)
5. Goliath • Gargoyles
6. Seven of Nine • Star Trek
7. Alexis Castle • Castle
8. Tommy Oliver • Power Rangers
9. Barbara Gordon • Batman Beyond
10. Carmela Rodriguez • Young Wizards (Duane)
11. Gabriel Agreste • Miraculous Ladybug
12. Joan Watson • Elementary
13. Pat Dugan • Stargirl (TV)
14. Kermit the Frog • Muppets
15. Stephen Strange • MCU

Now, then (some questions have been slightly edited to supply pronouns appropriate to the characters involved):

From astrogirl:
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From thisbluespirit (who gets bonus good-kind-of-evil points for springing questions on me that I asked them in a prior round):
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From kernezelda (by way of astrogirl, due to a threading anomaly (or possibly a multi-parallel space-time inversion):
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From acorn_squash:
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Reading online this morning, I find news of Tom Lehrer's passing. This is not perhaps unexpected in itself; he had led a long and fruitful life, but it's definitely a moment for reflection, as Lehrer was possibly the cleverest and most literate satirist of our time, not to mention the funniest.

More than usually, though, one of my favorite Diane Duane quotes applies: "What's loved, survives." We still have the music (and that's a very literal "we"; per his Web site, Lehrer a couple of years ago released his entire oeuvre into the public domain.

And in the wake of the news, it turns out he also left behind a (formerly) top secret mathematical joke that took more than half a century to fully detonate. (sanguinity, you should appreciate this....)

I will have extremely limited access to a full-sized keyboard this week (phone, yes; proper keyboard, no), but don't want to disappear without acknowledging two wonderful recently-written gifts:

From Unsent Letters 2025:
A Series of Notes Attached to A UNIT Requisition Form by astrogirl

Three and the Brigadier navigate the halls of bureaucracy (and the vastness of time and space) in pursuit of an electron microscope. A perfect replication of the reality of bureacuratic procurement channels...

From Holmestice, Summer 2024:
a study in violin by unrevealed

A full-fledged and dead-flat-brilliant novella (!) following Elementary's Sherlock Holmes through a lifetime spent with a Stradivarius (and a great many complicated relationships).

Per immediately prior post, this is disastrously late - all the more embarrassing given that my gift for the prior round is genuinely exceptional. It's very much what it says on the tin - a post-ACD letter from Watson to Holmes, describing in eloquently researched detail (complete with a generous set of bibliographic links) the former's activities as a military medic during WW I:

A Letter From France
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Author rabidsamfan
Rating: General Audiences
Category: gen Warnings: none
Words: ~4600
Relationship: Holmes & Watson
Character: John Watson
Additional Tags: Ambulance Trains, Battle of the Somme, Correspondence, Watson knows Holmes can read between the lines, World War I

Watson writes to Holmes after becoming the commander of an Ambulance Train just before the Battle of the Somme.

For my part, I committed a more-than-usually ambitious fusion, merging elements of Laurie King's Mary Russell universe with those of Elementary....

The Really Final Problem
Fandoms: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King; Elementary
Rating: General Audiences
Category: gen, f/m
Warnings: none
Words: ~7600
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson, Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell, Sherlock Holmes & Sherlock Holmes
Characters: Sherlock Holmes (x2), Mary Russell, Joan Watson, Estelle Holmes
Additional Tags: crossover, fusion

Joan Watson's Sherlock Holmes has just come back to life.

Mary Russell's Sherlock Holmes has just come home with a copy of Joan Watson's book.

One Holmes is looking for an inheritance; the other has already bestowed it.

I can't write short letters worth a darn, so while I've got detailed material farther down, it's only fair to give you the list of fandom requests up front. So, those would be:

Batman (1966)
Crossover Fandom(s) - see below
Doctor Who
Gargoyles
Kim Possible
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Power Rangers Time Force
Stargate (SG-1)

Feel free to wander backward through this journal and my fic on AO3 (linked to your left) to get an idea of my interests; what I write is very much also what I like to read – and has, over time, added up to rather a variety of fandoms. My past letters for various exchanges are tagged "dear santa" herein.

Things I like:

I’m a flexible reader; the story I want most out of a given exchange is usually the one you want to tell me rather than the one that’s living in my own head (that one, if I want it badly enough, I can always write myself).

Text-driven pluses for me include effective use of wit (aka banter aka snark, etc.), as well as strong characterization & dialogue. I value both respect for and clever use of canon (including well-developed canon-divergence AUs). I thrive on UST (heavy on both U and T), and am neutral where gen/het/slash is concerned; if the pairing is well-developed, I'll read with an open mind.

None of my requests call specifically for mature/explicit content. This doesn't mean I don't appreciate sizzling erotica/smut/porn; it's just that my fanfic-reading interests and my e/s/p-reading interests mostly don't intersect. Also, for this exchange, I find myself not especially interested in any of these characters writing e/s/p.

DNWs:

AUs. For this exchange, avoid alt-setting (i.e. coffeeshop, high school, dept. store, etc.). and major canon-divergence in non-crossover requests. This does not mean you can’t extend on canon, fill in blanks, etc.; indeed, Unsent Letters strike me as designed for just this sort of thing. Nor does this necessarily preclude crossovers, even if not formally built into a request.

Explicit sex, or “sexting” exchanges. Most likely not an issue as nearly all my requests are "&" rather than "/", but to be clear - basically, this just isn’t my jam. Non-explicit mention or discussion of sex is fine, though. Please avoid noncon, incest, adult/child, power-imbalanced sexual/romantic partnerships (teacher/student, boss/underling, etc.), and A/B/O settings.

Romantic elements that directly contradict canon. Also unlikely to be an issue, per above, but to amplify: where a character explicitly states a sexual preference/identity in canon, honor the statement. OTOH, if no preference/identity is specified onstage, it’s OK to establish – or widen – one for a given character. It's also OK to create or expand relationships for unpaired characters, including cross-canonical pairings where the potential arises.

Requests:

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I am behind on any number of things, but the trail of breadcrumbs backward from sanguinity's post today made me go back and rummage through the poetry shelf on the wall across the room, looking at some of my favorite authors...

...but what I'm actually posting is something a trifle more obscure. (An abbreviated two-stanza version is in some circulation among Irish folk musicians, often cited as "traditional" - I first heard it on an Irish Rovers album when I was in grade school - so I was much surprised when I ran across the full text below some decades later in a used bookstore, in The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World, Volume Two. I promptly bought the book, of course, and hope someday to find a recorded - and properly credited - version of the poem in its entirety....)

The Fairies
William Allingham

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together,
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather.

Down by the rocky shore
Some make their home--
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow sea-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.

High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and grey,
He's nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back
Between the night and morrow;
They thought she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees,
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As to dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!

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My recipient this round was mundungus42, for whom I also wrote "The Possibility of the Improbable" quite a few rounds back. Initially, I thought this gave me a chance to write a tale I'd had in the back of my head for years...but that idea declined to supply a plot to go with it, and so I reread the signup post, noticed an improbable-looking possibility (why yes, you should be picking up a theme here), asked myself a couple of key "what if" questions...

...and the rest pretty much rolled out like a magic carpet from there, including two complete musical numbers, a sheep (or SHEEP), and a theater that may just be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

The Affair of the Command Performance
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD); Muppet Show
Rating: G
Category: gen
Warnings: none Words: ~6900
Relationship: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Kermit the Frog, Statler (Muppets), Waldorf (Muppets), Sweetums (Muppets), Scooter (Muppets), Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Beaker (Muppets), Rowlf the Dog, Baskerville (Muppets), Rizzo the Rat
Additional Tags: musical, songs, stealth crossover

Holmes and Watson are invited to an evening at the theater - only to find themselves guests at an unexpected celebration with an even more unexpected mystery behind it, and an even more unlikely performance as its featured climax.

Yes, I'm late with this....

That said: My gift-writer and I both went for MCU prompts this time out. My gift was one of two really excellent Yelena-and-Natasha stories written for this exchange:

Bringing Her Home
Author flipflop_diva
Fandom: MCU; Black Widow (Movie 2021)
Rating: teen
Category: gen
Warnings: no archive warnings apply
Words: ~1100
Relationship: Yelena Belova & Natasha Romanov
Characters: Yelena Belova, Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Steve Rogers
Additional Tags: Post-Avengers: Endgame; (Movie) Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence; Post-Canon Fix-It; Natasha Romanov Lives; Sisters; Little Sisters; Letters

Steve was the one who brought the letters to her, folded gently and stacked carefully and tied with a thin red ribbon. He told her he found them in one of the metal safes that had originally been in one of the offices at Avengers compound in upstate New York. One of the very few things to survive the destruction caused by Thanos and his army. Almost like it was fate.

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My contribution was (this being me) a crossover; in this case, an exchange mostly involving Dr. Stephen Strange and Elementary's Joan Watson. (It's a small multiverse. I had, in a previous Unsent Letters entry, established that she and SG-1's Dr. Janet Fraiser were in med school together at Columbia; here, it turns out that she and Dr. Strange overlapped during their residencies.)

A Strange Correspondence
Fandom: MCU, Dr. Strange (Movies)
Rating: G
Category: gen
Warnings: none
Words: ~4400
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson (Elementary); Stephen Strange & Joan Watson; Sherlock Holmes & Stephen Strange
Characters: Joan Watson, Stephen Strange, Sherlock Holmes
Additional Tags: Musical, Songs, Stealth Crossover

Sometimes, even a Master of the Mystic Arts needs to call on others for assistance.